


Out Of The Void

by amorremanet



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angel/Vessel Relationships, Biblical References, Community: hc_bingo, Dark, Dark Character, Demon/Vessel Relationships, Demonic Possession, Dubious Consent, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Episode: s01e11 Scarecrow, Episode: s05e14 My Bloody Valentine, Episode: s07e21 Reading is Fundamental, F/M, Ficlet Collection, Lies, Nephil!Meg, Nephilim, Non-Linear Narrative, Other, Vessel Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-09
Updated: 2012-08-09
Packaged: 2017-11-11 19:33:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/482118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amorremanet/pseuds/amorremanet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>It's nothing Meg would wish on anyone. Not even Crowley. Not even the lowest of his thralls. Empty vessels wrack a demon with chills. …The emptiness must be ten times worse for angels.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Out Of The Void

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the prompt, "loss of limb / limb function" [for hc_bingo](http://amor-remanet.livejournal.com/545264.html). This isn't exactly a sequel to, "[And that's what's in a name](http://archiveofourown.org/works/386683)," but it assumes the same backstory for demon!Meg.

When she needs a body, she finds Margaret Josephine Masters—called Meg, because she shares that name with her grandmother and must distinguish herself. She finds Meg Masters when the girl's walking alone on her university's campus. Heading home from a study session at the library. How perfectly normal. Ordinary. Her dreams are so simple—get her degree and her clinical training, go to graduate school, eventually become a mother and a Nurse Practitioner.

This poor girl with her impoverished little dreams. She's so much less than her ancestors, the ones that Belial's worn—and so much more than she's become at present—and Belial is no mere demon. She has mercy. She understands what Meg Masters really needs and she will be that. So she manifests herself—she comes to Meg Masters in a cloud of black smoke, whispering to her while no one else is around to overhear them or to see. Not that anyone could understand their speech—it's a private language for a demon and her host. And Belial murmurs softly in her poor lost girl's ear and taps into the back of her head.

 _I see your anger, Margaret_ , she says, curling up in the unraveled little knots of emotion that Meg Masters shares with no one, not even her precious baby sister. _I feel how much you've longed to destroy so many people—I feel the way you've burned with righteous rage and I know you._ She curls her smoke around Meg's skin, brushes her icy tendrils down Meg's warm cheeks, the gentle curve of her neck—but she doesn't enter Meg's body. She can't enter. Not yet. She just keeps whispering, letting her words trip up and down Meg's being. She watches the vibrations—the ripples—that her speech causes over the girl's skin and her soul.

 _Don't you want more than this, Sweetheart? I'm your family curse, but none of them have been Sweetheart before. I'd like it if you could be my Sweetheart. Let me help you. Let me teach you how to burn. I'll make everything you ever dreamed of possible and more_ —she skips over the part where possession means exactly what it sounds like. She leaves out her own agenda—how she needs to find Sam Winchester and keep an eye on him, get him to her father if she can—because that might get in the way of things.

That might keep Meg Masters from opening her mouth and hissing, _yes_. That might keep Belial out here in the cold, dressed as smoke, unable to work in the world. It might keep her from finally finding a name that fits her how it ought to—properly and warm, without calling her _filth_ or _worthless_ or any of the things that were on her mother's mind.

*******

Gethsemane's cold, even with an angel in it—and Belial feels it as soon as the winged ass-monkey swoops into the garden. A rush of heat as the wind blows over everything, ruffles her vessel's hair, then it all subsides. She looks up from the ground, over at the tree he's leaning on, and wrinkles her nose. Well, she wrinkles Judas Iscariot's nose, the same way that the angel tilts Mary Magdalene's head.

Well, anyway, someone's head gets tilted and someone's nose gets wrinkled, and what matters more is that Belial _knows_ this angel. It takes her a moment of squinting, trying to see past the comely, unveiled vessel—but she makes out his true form past the human shield and the mask that Magdalene creates. She sees his massive height, his long spindly limbs and spider-leg fingers, his three heads—a tiger, an octopus complete with tentacles, and something vaguely humanoid, with all but the bright blue eyes covered by a white mask.

She sees the angel's true form as clearly as she sees her own—as clearly as she sees her talons, despite the mask of the Iscariot's skinny fingers. And she twists her-lips-but-Judas's up in a tight smirk as she says, _hello, Castiel_.

All four of his expansive black wings perk up at this. Flutter in agitation as he replies, "Belial. You are not meant to be here."

"You weren't meant to be inside of Yehudah over here," she says, carding her hands back through Judas's thick, untamed, black curls. "I thought it was more my crowd's purview to damn people to execution— _especially_ when those people are kind of your little brother? That's what I'd guess Yeshua is, anyway. What with the whole, 'son of God' thing."

"Yehudah called me into him," Castiel explains, somehow managing a deep intonation when he's talking to Belial with Magdalene's lilting voice. "My true orders were to be inside of Yeshua, but Yehudah wished to avoid that—or to postpone it, as we have actually done. He didn't want for his teacher and his lover to suffer a possession. Even when my being an angel means that is the incorrect term for what happened."

Belial chuckles under her breath—leave it to some feathery douchebag to explain things to her like she's a child. "I guessed that when the Son's lips tasted like angel dust."

"Yeshua's faith had wavered. He has known since the beginning that he is meant to die. He has known for the past year that it would all end here. That he would die tomorrow, as a criminal, and in that sacrifice, he will redeem humanity—but…" Castiel sighs as though he means to say something very, very negative about humans and has to talk himself out of it. "We in the Empyrean saw him weakening, starting to question whom he's saving and if his death will truly accomplish anything. My superiors decided something needed to be done."

"Well, not for nothing, Castiel," she snarks and arches Judas's eyebrow at him, "but my superiors sent me here, too. The way that Lilith put it, ensuring that Yeshua went on to his crucifixion would weaken his Disciples' faith. Make them all scatter and deny him, ostracize Judas, even though he didn't do anything—and even though his actions are only everything he's said needs to happen in order to _truly_ make him the Messiah. Temporary defeat, maybe, but humans have been getting into Heaven before now anyway—and the discord we get in the long run? Will be _completely_ worth the wait."

She can't make out any expression on his true face, but she sees Magdalene's fall into some bemused kind of disappointment. And Belial snickers again. "Makes you wonder about your superiors, doesn't it? Wonder what they're really telling you?" She traces her eyes up and down the length of his vessel. "Why'd Mary over here let you into her, anyway?"

The angel huffs and shuffles his feet. His wings fold up around him, almost sheepishly. And his voice is small, quiet, as he admits, "Because she wanted me to save Yeshua's life."

*******

Castiel's chatty when he wakes up in the hospital. He's got a lot of things on his mind, apparently, and luckily for him, Meg's gotten assigned to his case above all others. There are patients she could help take care of, but she's his personal caretaker. The angel on _his_ shoulder for a change—at least until his boyfriend and the moose get their asses here and Cas probably runs off with them again.

Meg wants to enjoy this while it lasts, but it's hard to enjoy anything when this isn't even the complete opposite of the Castiel she knows. There's enough of him in there—more than enough, even—but he's so intent on acting like he's wholly different. On twisting himself in knots as though it might make him something other than himself.

At this point, she's usually his partner in chatting about whatever on his mind at the moment. She follows him down to the garden and talks about the flowers. She watches him watching the bees and listens to his musings about their flight patterns, supposes that there's some music in their patterns, whatever that means. She sits with him in the common room at lunch because sure, neither of them needs to eat, but he's curious about watching the other patients. Talking about them, drawing their stories out of what comes off as thin air.

Or talking about other things sometimes, like today, while they're playing Connect Four and watching the people around them eat.

"Jimmy would love today's meal," Cas says with a small, enigmatic smile. Unreadable, the way he's intent on being so often, these days. "Cheeseburgers were a favorite of his—and I can understand why. When we fought off Famine, I wound up eating several hundred of them myself, and they _are_ delicious." And then Cas sighs as though he's carrying the weight of the world on his back. "This body's enjoyment of them would be entirely on me, now."

Meg sighs, drops one of her red pieces into place, and reaches over the table to squeeze his shoulder. "If it makes you feel any better, Clarence? Charlotte's gone out of this body, too. Do you want to talk about it?" She's heard other nurses ask the patients this question. Occasionally, the patients ask it among themselves. And Meg pauses while Cas thinks it over; she waits for him to nod and asks him, "So when did Jimmy disappear?"

Cas shrugs. "Just after Famine," he says. "He didn't even make it to that incident with the liquor store. Not that it was wholly unexpected. His presence had gotten faint by Valentine's Day, but I don't… It was a comfort, having him around, but I have no idea why my Father forced him to endure what we went through together. Surely, it would have been a mercy to simply let him die. He should have passed on even before Raphael made his first attempt on my life."

"Yeah, well… maybe your Father got some inscrutable ideas in His head about who deserved more mercy, right at that moment." Meg doesn't believe this for a second—maybe Yahweh Elohim reached in to save His son, but Meg knows that He's no god of mercy the way that Castiel wants to think—and still she says it. Because it might give Cas some comfort to see things this way. "Sure, it must've sucked for Jimmy, getting blown up and whatever else happened to the two of you, but… maybe He didn't want you to be alone. Maybe He didn't want to stick you in an empty vessel."

It's nothing Meg would wish on anyone. Not even Crowley. Not even the lowest of his thralls. Empty vessels wrack a demon with chills. Set them shivering in the dark, all alone, with no one there to help them, no one there to hold onto. Writhing and quivering and constantly in pain—missing something that they can't articulate and can never get back. Not without taking a new meat-suit. Not without subjecting _that_ person to the same kind of Hell—not that most of Meg's black-eyed brethren care about their hosts.

But Castiel knots his brow and frowns, without the conversation being all that deep. Meg rests her hand on top of his, squeezes at his palm. And he asks her when Charlotte went away. The emptiness must be ten times worse for angels.

"I let her go after the warehouse," Meg says, sighing, shrugging. "She kept screaming during the torture. Telling me this wasn't what I promised her would happen when she said, 'yes.' …I just didn't think it was fair to keep putting her through that—and fighting Crowley meant that she'd almost certainly go through more of it. So I let her go. Only came back in at the last second. She got to spend her last word saying, 'yes' a second time. _Dulce et decorum est_ and all that garbage."

Castiel blinks at her as though she's some museum specimen. "You need consent to enter a vessel?"

She shrugs again and can't meet his eyes when they have that off-kilter glint that looks so much like concern. "Always have, Clarence. None of the other demons I know do. None of them ever have—not even Dad, and he used to be a proper angel… But I guess I'm just special. The last of the nephilim. Always stuck in the middle—and the only one of her siblings who _really_ listened to Dad. Y'know, it seemed like a much better survival mechanism at the time? Trusting the yellow-eyed man who promised to make everything better… He sort of left out the part where I'd end up alone."

Castiel says nothing, just adjusts his hand. Laces his fingers up with hers and squeezes her hand in return.


End file.
